Quinta das Abelhas

The permanent fencing around the horses’ terraces is now complete - wooden posts with electric wire. This gives us all the white plastic electric fence posts to be able to put them on temporary pasture around the rest of the quinta.

Today we’ve put fencing around the upper terraces, near our ruin, and the horses are very happy. Lots of grazing for the fatties!

The chestnuts are Ayla and Maurice. Both arab cross dutch warmbloods, with lovely temperatments, although Ayla the mare can be a little stroppy at times. The darker gelding is called Daan, who used to run trotting races in Holland. He is gentle as a lamb, but does like to go fast despite his age - 24 years old.

And heres another happy chappy. Afonso’s great grandad, who stopped by to visit and offered to do a bit of weeding. Looks good for his age too!

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Take a look, other years Sophie’s garden looks like this at the end of March or early April. I really hope we get an Indian summer, and the plants get a long enough growing season for us to preserve food for the winter. Its so late this year, but at least the crops are starting to grow properly and produce some grub for us techno peasants.

And heres a couple more flowery photos. It rained again yesterday, proper rain, so the ground is wet again. It was perfect timing as I bought lots of young plants at market, which were watered in by the rain.

I posted a shot of this flower earlier in the year - now they are in full swing, heres another picture:

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I think there are 3 or 4 different types of sunflowers in my garden, but I’d be inclined to say that these are my favourites:

Although I have a memory like a sieve, I believe these are clustering sunflowers, that should put up more heads over the coming weeks. But I could be wrong!

I also just took another photo of Irises, or Iris type plants/flowers growing in the shade around the back of the house. These are a darker shade than the ones I snapped a little while ago. Very very beautiful, but having just looked at pictures on the internet, they aren’t Irises. I dont know what they are - anyone got any ideas?

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“Andy’s living the dream of many 9 to 5′ers, but would you swap a forty hour conventional work week for a varied and active day that starts at 6am and sometimes goes beyond 10pm in the interests of self-sufficiency? Hear for yourself what life is like at Quinta das Abelhas (Honeybee Farm), a 4 hectare organic smallholding situated in the “green heart” of Portugal’s Beiras region.”

Listen at www.traydio.com

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“Birds singing, a goat herder whistling for his herds, dogs barking at the goat herder and windchimes - it’s another busy day at the Quinta das Abelhas Central Portugal.”

Listen at www.traydio.com

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